Digitally Speaking… The integration of Paid, Owned and Earned Media will ultimately drive marketing results.

How paid media works.

Paying to stimulate interest in your site will give you more exposure. It’s no secret that big players in social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can help boost traffic and interest. Influencers, too, can have impact by sharing tweets or links to your site. Other ways to drive traffic include retargeting, display ads, and pay per click.

What is owned media?

Your website, blog sites, and channels of social media are web real estate that you create, monitor, and control. All these represent your brand and offer more opportunity to promote your brand digitally.

What does earned media mean?

Earned media is the combination of online shares, mentions, reviews, reposts, viral posts, recommendations, and word of mouth that create recognition, trust and traffic. What will garner earned media for you are strong organic rankings on the search engines, as well as your content that is shared based on the brand.

You’ll often get more engagement and shares if you rank on the first page of a search. That’s where solid SEO strategy comes in. Earned media is valuable and can only be gained using quality content that informs, engages, teaches, and influences a subject with fresh perspective.

For all marketers the major drivers of success are first page rankings, well-constructed content and valuable site traffic that converts. As users continue to interact via social and other app platforms – without visiting the website – the earned media becomes increasingly important.

In conclusion.

All three of these digital media are important, so you must decide what makes the most sense based on your resources. Your brand can thrive provided you take the time to perform regular maintenance and analytics, be consistent with proven SEO strategy, attract and retain trusted influencers, and make informed decisions using paid media.